Install Microsoft Office Click-to-Run (C2R) and MSI products side by side

Microsoft has blocked users from installing subscription based click to run software and license base windows installer (msi) products on the same device. I haven’t been able to find a proper explanation as to why this is the case other than some vague note that they won’t work well together.

Nevertheless we had to install these products on the same computer, as we wanted to use the licenses that we already owned. And I have installed and used them together without running in to any issues so far (obviously that doesn’t mean it’s 100% issue free).

Things to note:
At the moment If you have either a C2R product or a MSI product currently installed you won’t be able to install the corresponding other.
The example below is how to install a MSI product (e.g. Visio) when there is office 365 C2R product already installed.
Once this work around is in place if you plan to uninstall a product, you would get the same error message. So you need to have a custom uninstall script.

The main issue is the prompt below that you get, which stops the installation from progressing.

I ran “Process Monitor” to audit what the setup application is doing during the installation. And as you can see it enumerates the installed programs list, and searches for the specific application types. What we can do is to Delete(temporarily) the office 365 C2R install REG files and then go ahead with the installation. And after the installation import back the registry settings.

The example batch commands below are to export/delete/import the REG settings for Office 365 2016 C2R

Export the registry to the current directory where the script is locatedregedit /e %~dp0\O365Export.reg “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\O365ProPlusRetail – en-us”
Delete the registry keys for Office 365 C2Rreg delete “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\O365ProPlusRetail – en-us” /f
Now you can install the MSI product without any issues
After the installation is done you can import back the settings.REGEDIT /S %~dp0\O365Export.reg

And obviously you can package up the application in conjunction with the commands above so these applications can be deployed without any user interventions.

I tried this fix to install Visio but when I go to the …\Uninstall location in the registry there IS NOT anything that has the O365 as part of the file name. I am running WIN 10. DO you have another fix or am I doing it wrong?

Jim,
The above was only tested on on Win7. I just had a look on a win10 machine and was able to find it in “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\O365ProPlusRetail – en-us”
Can you take a look in “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\” ?